He knew the reason for it. At least he thought he knew it. He had only to look at himself in the mirror to gain insight. He was overweight, over forty, and overworked. That was how he felt sometimes... over.

When the penis isn't erect, not even slightly, it's difficult for a man to know that it's there. He has to touch it to confirm it hasn't fallen off.

Paul looked down over the dome of his flabby stomach to his flaccid cock. Flaccid. Sounds like deflated. A pricked prick. A good description of himself perhaps.

No. He was wallowing in self-pity now and starting to enjoy it. Stop. Remember what started you thinking about impotence in the first place. Impotence was only a problem because of desire and the spur to his desire lay next to him.

Anna was still sleeping, holding one of her pillows in an intimate embrace that he almost envied. She looked peaceful. He'd been watching her for some minutes now.

Paul had always liked to watch her sleep. In the early days she had thought it cute. Later she said it was weird and had asked him to stop. He usually slept 6 hours or less; she needed at least 8 hours before she was ready to face the day so he had plenty of opportunity to watch without her knowing.

An old Rod Stewart song played in his head "The morning sun when it's in your face really shows your age. But that don't bother me none in my idea of anything". They had danced together at discos to that song when they were young and their had skin not yet been inexpertly folded by time and experience. Only now did he really understand what Rod had meant. Anna hated the lines on her face and although she was doomed to lose the war of attrition against them, nevertheless she fought each battle fiercely. Paul felt the lines gave her face character, showed her as someone with many reasons to frown but who was not afraid to laugh.

Anna wore a silk slip to bed. The shimmer of the dark green fabric reminded Paul of the flecks of green, mica-like, fragments, in Anna's dark brown eyes. He let his hand follow the curve of her silk covered flank, waiting for his body to exhibit the level of arousal his mind already felt.

There had been a time when waiting was not only unnecessary but unthinkable. Once, when they were both 18, Anna had sat next to him on the sofa. It was midafternoon; her mother was serving them tea. Anna's skirt was fashionably short and as she sat, Paul felt the heat of her bare flesh touching his jean-covered leg. His erection had been instantaneous and formidable. Anna, oblivious to her effect on him had chatted to her mother and offered him cake. He had sat, making polite conversation, waiting for this lust-laden tide to ebb.

It had been another year before he entered her for the first time. Neither of them was confident. Each would have liked the other to take charge. But they managed and, after a bit of practice, succeeded in pleasing one another most of the time. They had always tended towards the occasional extended sessions of sex rather than a nightly routine. Sometimes they would spend hours and hours in sexual play. Anna's friends told her she was lucky to have a man of such stamina, yet both Paul and Anna felt a dissatisfaction they did not discuss. Anna listened to her friend's joke "Why does the woman always have to sleep in the wet patch after sex? ­ Because he's already rolled over and fallen asleep before you have a chance to move of course", aware that there were no wet patches in her bed. Paul never came inside her. He stayed hard for a long time but she never felt the rush of his sperm, the signal she felt she needed to trigger her own orgasm. There was pleasure and intimacy but also an omission concealed in conspiratorial silence.

Paul was relieved when Anna took a lover. Neither of them mentioned it until it was over. He was a mutual friend, a free spirit, determinedly single, who cherished her in his way and brought his wide experience to bear on meeting her needs.

One night, a month after the affair started, Anna was lying with her head on Paul's chest and her leg wrapped over his hip when she said, "I won't be seeing him any more".

Paul had stroked her hair and listened to the quickening of his own pulse. "Why not?" he'd asked.

"It makes me lonely" she had said.

The silence that followed had eventually lapsed into the release of sleep.

The sunlight had moved down the bed and was now warming Anna's thighs. Paul put his finger and thumb around his cock, rolled back the foreskin and stroked the exposed head against Anna's buttock. Stubbornly soft, the penis was at least able to register pleasure at that skin to skin contact. Paul drew the outline of a heart on Anna's smooth flesh. She adjusted her position to move in towards him and, although her eyes remained closed, he knew she was now awake and aware of him. He felt discouraged. His limp flesh seemed an affront to her warm curves.

Paul lay on his back, let go of his penis, and closed his eyes. Anna rolled over to face him. Without looking at her he said, "I'm sorry. I can't. I want to, but I can't".

"Shhh" Anna said "if you can't then don't. Relax. I love you." mouth closing over his left nipple "every part of you" engulfing his right nipple "from your hairy chest" cheek brushing the coarse, now grey streaked, hair, "to your suckable balls". Paul groaned as she pulled him into her mouth. She had always loved doing this. He had never understood why she liked it but he accepted it as one of the possible proofs of the existence of a loving God.

Lifting her head with a soft plopping noise, Anna said, "Hmmm. I see some motion"

Paul knew his cock was now semi-hard. Semi-useful. Semi-soft. Semi-male. The moment he focused on this threat of tumescence it vanished. Neither he nor Anna commented on his shrinking flesh, but they were careful not to meet each other's eyes.

Just before the silence became so long that it would have crushed both of them, Anna spoke. "I want to play a game." she said.

Inwardly Paul groaned. A game? What next, plastic toys and rubber clothing? Sad sexless porn videos futilely stoking a flagging libido. He could not, would not, let these thoughts show on his face. Anna deserved better; she was being brave. So, in an awful approximation of Sean Connery's accent, he slurred "A game Miss Moneypenny? As you can see I'm shaken but not stirred".

As soon as he spoke he wished he could have called the words back; too much vulnerability there. He searched Anna's eyes, unconsciously holding his breathe, looking for tears or reproach and was relieved to find laughter; gentle laughter.

"Pay attention Mr Bond" Anna said "Any infringement of the rules of the game will be punished severely".

"Thank you Miss Moneypenny. I look forward to it"

"Shh. Pay attention. Here are the rules of the game you must place your hands under your buttocks, palms facing upwards; you may not enter me; you may not speak; you may not move your hands; you may not close your eyes. The game will cease if any rule is broken"

Not a spontaneously generated set of rules, Paul realised. Anna had been thinking about this.

Obediently he placed his hands under his ass, distracted by the double sensation of palm on skin and skin on palm. Anna repositioned herself astride his thighs, facing him.

"And the object of the g..." he started to ask but Anna leaned forward and closed his lips between her finger and thumb.

"No talking," she said, "The game is starting."

She knelt back on her heals, looked him in the eyes, smiled with one side of her mouth (the left side always smiles first, he thought), crossed her arms in front of her and took hold of the hem of her slip.

Afterwards he would watch the mind-movie of her slip rising up her body and over her head many times. The feline stretch of muscle and limb. The sun on belly and breast. The shoulder length brown hair falling free of the green silk passing through it. The wide, wanton, smile on her face as she looked down at him.

In theory her body held no surprises for him. He knew the history of every scar and had traced every curve. In practice she took his breath away. Beauty, Virginia Wolf had said, moves through women like a wave of energy, illuminating them and moving on. Above him Anna seemed filled with a numinous light that made it impossible to look away from her.

Anna's hands danced a ballet as, fingertips never leaving the surface of her skin, they traced two lazy S shapes, starting at the flare of her hips, meeting above her navel, journeying around the outer curves of her breasts, to meet and touch below her sternum. Slowly her palms took possession of her breasts, cupping them and pushing them upwards slightly.

As the left hand laid claim to the breast it held, closing around it, weighing it, squeezing it; the right hand snaked downwards until Anna's fingertips rested in the light covering of pubic hair.

Paul could almost hear the slow beat of the silent music Anna's body was responding to. Her shoulders remained still and her back straight but her thighs, hips and belly rolled sinuously as the music moved through her. Her left hand worked her breast in counterpoint to the circles her right hand was tracing. Anna looked as if she was making love to the sunlight.

More than anything, Paul wanted to touch her, to feel her heat, but he could not move his hands without breaking the spell (and the rules of the game ­ what was the object of the game?). The tempo of the music seemed to increase as Anna swayed above him, eyes closed, lost in the motion, surrendering to the caress of her fingers and the pulse of her lust. After a few seconds she became still.

Anna had never spoken much during sex, her vocalizations had always been preverbal expressions of emotion, so her words caught Paul by surprise. Looking him in the eyes she said, "I'm open. I'm wet. Very wet."

Caught up in an adult show-and-tell, Anna parted her labia gently and lifted her glistening fingertip to the sunlight. "I am hungry." she said, "You will feed me. You will be my meat."

This is not like her, Paul thought, yet it seems real, not pretend. How many times has she felt this and remained silent? What did she mean by meat?

To his surprise Paul felt his prick begin to stir. It was not yet hard but it was making him aware of its presence. Back when he had taken his potency for granted this had happened to Paul often during the course of the day. His prick would nudge his consciousness like a friendly dog brushing its nose against his leg; just to let him know it was there. Nothing urgent, just a torpid tumescence, pleasant against the thigh.

"Mmmmmm" Anna said "meat". With a precision he had seen her use when decorating cakes, Anna's fingers gently aligned his prick so that rested on its back against his belly like a sunbather on a beach. Smiling not at him but at the relaxed and happy sunbather, Anna moved forward and lowered herself until her labia held his prick in a warm wet embrace. Paul moaned. The sensation was strange but... delicious.

Anna placed her hands over Paul's nipples, pushing her fingers through his chest hair. Then she began to... he didn't know what to call it... rock? slide? ride? stroke? What ever it was called it felt amazing. With most of her weight on her arms, Anna slowly moved herself along Paul's prick, squeezing it like a tube of toothpaste.

On the forward stroke her breasts pushed out and up between her braced arms. On the backward stroke her head dropped below her shoulders as she raised her hips until her pussylips just grazed him on their progress along his shaft.

Paul hadn't known her arms were so strong. Drops of sweat fell from her forehead on to his chest with each backward stroke. Her body was slick in the sunlight.

On the final backward stroke Anna repositioned herself so that her pubic bone, carrying all her weight, rested on the base of his prick, grinding in to him. She swayed there, arms trembling, head back, nipples trumpeting pleasure. He didn't know if she came or not. But she glowed; glowed so brightly that the image of her was burnt into his brain.

Then, like a cloud suddenly obscuring the sun, she fell forward on to him, letting him taking all of her weight. Her heat was all over him. He was drowning in her smell.

She raised her head so her chin was on his breastbone and looked at him with tired satisfaction. "Game over" she said.

Paul carefully slipped his hands out from under him and wrapped her in his arms. She was close to sleep. He was close to happiness. Maybe everything wasn't over yet.